Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Marriage, Good, Bad and Indifferent

Marriage, what a glorious and godawful, tremendous and
terrible thing it is! Of all inventions one of the few rightfully enduring
ones, but surely an invention. Not something born into one automatically. Only
quirkily imaginable among cavemen and women,or what else would so many New Yorker cartoons revel in?

Precarious in some ways, yet almost universally desiderated,
even unto some seemingly unexpectable ones. I refer to the same-sex kind, which
a gay friend of mine couldn’t see the purpose of, and a lot of people deplored
unless they could find some other name for it and leave the traditional kind,
for better or worse, alone.

Even at a time when homosexuals no longer had to hide in the
closet or (term courtesy “The King and I”) kiss in the shadows, marriage became
highly useful to gays for all kinds of legal, financial or just existential
purposes. And yet, and yet . . .

Although I approve of same-sex marriage with both my brain
and heart, there are times when a small twinge, I can’t deny it, persists. It
is by no means a twinge of disapproval, only a twinge of the unexpected, as if,
say, something I dreamt about the night before actually came true in the
morning, or someone I approved of managed to obtain a genius award rather than
the customary politically correct winners in the arts.

But to get to the conventional marriage. The rare case among
spouses is a couple whom a friend of mine knew very well since school days.
They were college sweethearts who after many years of marriage remained just as
emotionally and sexually attractedto each other as before, gung ho in bed and everywhere else. I take that
friend’s word for it, although I myself never encountered such a couple. The
nearest thing to it I have known is a couple where the wife wore a different
wig to bed every night and made her husband feel he was conquering a new woman.
But even there, I wonder, how many different kinds of wigs are there in the
world and would a Lady GaGaor
other kind of fright wig do the trick?

I also wonder what happens when a, let’s say, ordinary guy
marries a gorgeous woman, e.g., a Diane Lane or Laura Osnes or Laura Dinanti,
or even a more modest but enormously pleasant-looking Laura, her looks clearly
supplemented by intelligence, like Laura Linney? A woman, let’s further say,
who manages to look terrific even in her later years? Can sexual attraction
possibly not wane much or at all?

Marcel Proust, who knew about such things, stipulated that
sexual passion could not outlast two years, and I have heard similar things from
less authoritative sources. Thus I have gathered from some smart and
trustworthy couples that, although it now occurred only once or twice a week,
they still had some pretty good times in the sheets.

And then, too, sex isn’t everything, in marriage as out of
it. Charm, brains, wit, jolliness, genuine deep goodness, manifold
individuality, and all-around helpfulnessgo a long way toward cementing marriages, don’t they? Besides, there is
a kind of manifest attractiveness possible in a woman who, without being
explicitly pretty, is hugely appealing, perhaps just by looking winningly
different. Originality is a magnet not to be underestimated. I myself have been
attracted to such women almost as often as to very beautiful ones.

There are to be sure marriages that end up in pure mutual
hatred. I have never encountered one
such, but have heard or read about plenty of them. There was even a recent
cartoon in the New Yorker (one of the now relatively rare not inscrutable ones)
with an ordinary couple facing each other across the table and the caption reading
something like “Isn’t it time we started hating someone on the outside?”
Indifference is more frequent than such an extreme, but not, I believe, all
that much more.

Probably the more common type is what a colleague has called
a Strindbergian marriage, though in a somewhat less August fashion. That means
steady petty bickering, though possibly with a more hostile implicit
undercurrent. There are apt to bethough not so much in real Strindberg) real
brief reconciliations, even some dormant affections mostly through habituation,
but the stream of insult or injury soon dependably recommences. This is
especially embarrassing when there are visitors present whom this
spectacle acutely discomfits.

Perhaps the most Strindbergian marriage, albeit without
outside observers, is not even by Strindberg, but—you guessed it—Edward Albee’s
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which manages to shock no matter how often we
experience it, and can even achieve new, startling dimensions of horror, as it
apparently does in a current London production. Albee, by the way, has
acknowledged his debt to the great Swede. What makes his play particularly
frightening is that it contains two embattled marriages, young and middle-aged,
taking place in Academia, with the elder spouses both intellectuals from whom
you would expect something more civilized.

But the sad truth, mined by the play, is that intellectuals
may be even better at hurting each other, although lesser couples do it well
enough too. The obvious reason is that marriage partners come to know each
other’s vulnerabilities and Achilles heels better than anybody else, and can
thus hurl all the more hurtful darts at each other. Fiction and theater provide
infinite examples of this, something so real and pervasive that neither authors
nor readers or audiences ever get tired of it. It also has the advantage of
lending itself to every kind of treatment from deeply tragic to madly farcical.

Lord Byron famously, though not necessarily correctly,
observed something like “Women, we cannot get along with or without them.”
Something similar might be applicable to marriage as well. To be sure, there is
the confirmed bachelor who voluntarily, and the spinster wallflower who
involuntarily, go through life alone. This is unfairly much easier for men, who
can readily get their sex while single, than for women, who, save for some
exceptional ones, only relatively recently acquired such sexual freedom. But
the vast majority of men and women seek out marriage, sanguinely or
precariously. As the seventeenth-century poet, Sir John Suckling put it (I
quote from memory), “One is no number till that two be one.” (Quite a
character, Sir John, who also wrote “Love is the fart/ Of every heart:/ It
pains a man when ‘tis kept close,/ And others doth offend, when ‘tis let
loose.”

Perhaps the best proof of the value of marriage—other than
the obvious one, progeny—is that throughout literature and history we get impassioned
utterances by men and women about their spouses, and is there a greater
fictional ending than Charlotte Bronte’s “Reader, I married him”? And is there
a more exalted term in the language than “helpmate”? (“Helpmeet” by the way is
incorrect, based on the Bible’s“help meet,” where, however,
“meet’ is an adjective meaning suitable, as Bryan Garner reminds us in his
invaluable ”Garner’s Modern English Usage.”)

Yes,history and literature provide far more examples of amazingly noble wives than
of like husbands—which has me using the nowadays most abused word in the English
language, “amazing,” without which television would apparently be
inconceivable. This fidelity goes back at least to Homer and faithful Penelope,
whose husband Ulysses was repeatedly unfaithful—but then what man wouldn’t be
during a troubled twenty-year absence from home? Still, where is there a
husband quite like Boccaccio’s patient Griselda, faithfully obedient despite
her tyrannical spouse’s monstrous meted out trials?

Offhand I cannot think of a
husband so faithful. There is even the one who allegedly put a chastity belt on
his wife’s vagina while he was off on theCrusades. In literature, the tendency is for men to be supremely devoted
to other men, as for instance, in myth, Damon and Pythias, and in literature,
the two friends in Schiller’s poem “Die Buergschaft.” In both cases, a friend
is willing to endure execution in place for an absent friend. How selfish, by
contrast, are Shakespeare’s Claudios, either the one in “Measure for Measure”
or the one in “Much Ado About Nothing.”

But what about marriage, for
which, in literature, Menander (342 BC to 292) set the tone: “Marriage, if one
will face the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil.” And so it usually
figures, from Socrates to Emma Bovary and beyond, rather like Tolstoy’s
families, noteworthy only when unhappy. It took a solidly Victorian poet,
Coventry Patmore, with a beautiful wife, to come up with a work called “The
Angel in the House,” the ultimate sentimental tribute to the missus. There is,
however, no lack of uxorial tributes, sometimes even to promiscuous wives,
though the latter usually from homosexual writers, who didn’t have any (viz.
Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, etc.).

I could go on, but let me
conclude with a well-deserved paean toIngmar Bergman’s “Story of a Marriage,” the uncut version, which manages
to say everything that is good and everything that isn’t about modern marriage.
It is a kind of compendium packed into a few hours of magisterial film that
everyone concerned with marriage, as well as everyone who is not, should see
and reflect about. It is by a genius who was both obsessed with and clear-eyed
about who loved them and left as he was loved and sometimes left by them. In the end,
though, he settled into what was a calm marriage with an extremely understanding
woman who, after his quiet demise, singly outlived him. A mother figure,
perhaps, and certainly the fitting haven for a profuse serial womanizer,
several times previously married, at
last, come to conjugal rest.

But not until he had said
everything that could be said about men and women, together or apart.

9 comments:

The Coolidge EffectPresident Calvin Coolidge and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown separately around an experimental government farm. When Mrs. Coolidge came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, "Dozens of times each day." Mrs. Coolidge said, "Tell that to the President when he comes by." Upon being told, the President asked, "Same hen every time?" The reply was, "Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time." The President said, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

God had just about finished creating the world, and Adam and Eve stood before him. God said to them, “I have only two things left to give you, then I will be done with creation. You each get one. Now, the first one gives you the ability to direct your urine in a perfectly directed stream. The second--”

“I want that one!” yelled Adam.

“Hold on, Adam, let Me finish what--”

“But I want that one! That’s the one I want!”

“But you haven’t even heard what the other one is yet, and--”

“I don’t care, that’s the one I want! Please, give me that one!”

“OK, OK, you got it,” said God, and Adam ran off, peeing against a tree, writing his name in the snow, and having a wonderful time with his new toy.

Yeah -- the ladies get that too though, right? The getting up in the middle of the night to empty the bladder... Ahh, but then the return to bed, the quiet --- the warmth --- the soothing words of the Domina Holy Ghost as she answers my questions and speaks soothing words to me. "The silence of God" my foot (and bladder)!

About Me

I've written for over 50 years on theatre, film, literature, music and fine arts for the Hudson Review, New Leader, New Criterion, National Review, New York magazine, Opera News, Weekly Standard, Broadway.com, Bloomberg News, The Westchester Guardian and on the Yonkers Tribune website. I'm continuing my contributions to the New York Times Book Review, Weekly Standard and New Criterion. Recently I've been seen on Heat Street. I have a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature.